Been noodling around with this briefing/debrief document that was presented to congress people before the UAP hearings in 2023 a bit. As noted in another thread, Michael Shellenberger has now said that a "current or former intelligence person" compiled what he calls the "UFO Timeline" and his
Public published it as well as gave copies to congress and media such as News Nation.
External Quote:
And the document was missing historical information that appeared in the
117-page "UAP Timeline" document created by a former or existing US government intelligence officer that Public published last year.
Public News (
https://www.public.news/p/pentagon-is-illegally-hiding-secret)
As noted in the other thread, I think this document has several purposes, but 2 main ones.
1. It serves as "sum is greater than the parts" type of argument. It's 177 pages long and has roughly 550 claims or reports concerning UFO's and all the accoutrements that accompany them. Giving to congressional staffers and members, it provides an argument that "they can't all be wrong, there must be something to the UFO topic".
2. For anyone reading through it and with respect to ARRO who Shellenberger thinks should have read through it and addressed it, it serves as a paper Gish Gallop. It's page after page and claim after claim, most of which are rumors, 2
nd hand retellings, speculation and some outright story telling. The sourcing, which we'll examine a bit below, is everything from old books to YouTube to reddit comments. As such, any reasonable review of each and every claim could take days if not weeks. By the time one shows the dubious nature of one claim, there are 500+ more to go. In effect, a Gish Gallop.
As for the "UFO Timeline" itself, as noted it's 177 pages, though there are reports of 200+ page version, but the 177 page version is (or was as I downloaded it) available. As explained in the OP, each claim appears as a blurb proceeded by the words (PUBLIC DOMAIN) in a green font. Then whatever the claim which is then followed by the source as a hyperlink in blue. Sometimes a grey "Note" box is also part of a claim. A few claims refer to the one immediately proceeding it, but for the most part each claim is unique:
There is some overlap, and multiple claims can refer to a central claim, like Roswell.
So, first up was just to search (PUBLIC DOMAIN) in the document. That netted 598 hits and as some do refer to specific claims more than once, I'm guessing at around 550-580 unique claims. That's a lot of claims, which again, I think is the point.
Next up was sourcing, where is all this stuff coming from? I basically scrolled back and forth and as I saw a source multiple times, I searched it. Obviously, there are lots of one offs or sources that appear a few times, but I was interested in ones I saw repeatedly so here's a breakdown of how many times these sources I kept noticing appeared:
Archive.org: 95
Amazon: 85
YouTube: 67
MUFON: 37
NICAP: 32
The Black Vault: 30
Reddit/comments: 30
Earthfiles: 27
bibliotecapleyades.net: 21
Abovetopsecret.com: 20
CUFON: 20
Twitter/X: 20
Other sources were less frequent with something like The Center for Inquiry, publishers of
Skeptical Inquirer or rationalwiki.org managing single mentions while Wikipedia had 12, though often as a secondary source.
At first glance this seems straight forward. The most often cited source is Archive.org which is the host for the Way Back Machine. It's a place where old internet stuff is collected and made available, and since much of the information in the "UFO Timeline" is from years ago, it's a logical place to find older material.
However, it's not so simple when we get to other sources. For example, after Archive.org we have Amazon at 85 hits and a bit below YouTube is MUFON with 37 source hits. As mentioned, much of the document is sourced with old books, which can be found at Amazon or as E-reader versions, so that makes sense. But it turns out 47 of the Amazon source hits, just over ½, refer to several volumes of 1 book, Jaque Vallee's
Forbidden Science. These volumes are basically Vallee's diaries recorded over the years as he searched for UFOs. So, ½ of the Amazon sources are Vallee's memories and recollections.
As for the MUFON sources, the Mutual UFO Network, is a civilian UFO investigation and reporting organization and accounts for 37 of the sources as one might expect. But not so fast, as 24 of the hits, nearly ¾, all reference a single presentation by Leonard "Leon" Stringfield at a 1978 MUFON convention. Noted UFOlogist Mr. Stringfield got up and presented all kinds of UFO stories, with little or no evidence, and they found their way into the "UFO Timeline":
The YouTube sourcing is problematic as there are no timestamps for any of the claims, just a link to the video in question. As anyone that has tried to watch a YouTube UFO video knows, some of these things can go on for hours. It becomes like finding a needle in a haystack, without a magnet.
Working down the list we get comments from reddit(?), the king of FOIA requests, John Greenwald's
The Blake Vault, understandably and then stuff like AboveTopSecret.com and Earthfiles.com.
Earthfiles is Linda Multon Howe's website of UFO rumors and stories. In fact, Howe's fantasy filled Earthfiles is sourced only 3 times less than Greenwald's actual FOIA documents. Howe was instrumental in testing and promoting the bits of junk known as Art's Parts, fully believed the ridiculous letters attesting to the parts coming from the Roswell crash, is big into animal mutilations, crop circles, lots of secret alien bases and likely introduced the UFOilogical world to Travis Taylor. Here's just a sample of the offerings on Earthfiles:
https://www.earthfiles.com/archive/
Howe's credulity eventually got the better of her when she reported on the secret Apollo 17, 18 and 20 launces to the moon on Coast to Coast AM. She went from being a long time regular on a show not known for a lot of fact checking or critical thinking, to being not welcomed back. Repeated secret launches of something as big and powerful as the Saturn 5 seemed a step too far.
Not to harp on Howe, she did later sorta recant the Apollo story, but just highlighting that 27 of the claims in this "UFO Timeline" are directly from her website.
Coming in at 30 as was the "comments" section of reddit.com. Honestly, I didn't bother chasing down the various comments from a forum based on chatter, rumors, credulity, trolling and the upvoting of said comments. Suffice it to say, these are NOT sources for anything. They may be a starting point to look into something, but not a source:
Notice a glaring omission in the sources? It took me a minute to find that besides any form of reputable news organizations being mentioned more than once, if at all, the most reliable go to source for basic information, Wikipedia, only got 12 hits.
Of those 12, most appeared to be references to basic facts, like biographical or company background like these:
So, it would seem that even Wikipedia was a bit too "factual" to make much of an impact on this document. Again, it's a list of actual cases and some real events intermingled with rumors, 2
nd hand retellings and outright fabrications all presented as equally valid.
As to who compiled it, no one is really sure. We speculated up-thread that Shellenberger or his staff put it together. Now he claims an intelligence operative of some kind compiled it and
Public published it. It's a bit confusing.
The timeline starts with Roswell in 1947 and ends with a claim by Coulthart that some physicists in Huntsville Alabama disappeared in February of 2023 (seriously, one could create a thread on each of these claims). So, it leaves out Grusch's claim of an Italian UFO recovery in 1939 and in a blow to Vallee, doesn't mention his 1945 Trinity NM crash. However, despite Trinity not making the cut, Vallee is mentioned a lot.
When looking for mentions of the old guard, like J. Allan Hynek, Stanton Friedman, Donald Keyhoe and some of the big names from latter part of the 20
th century like John Lear, William "Bill" Cooper, and Bob Lazar, they don't get mentioned all that much considering their influence on UFOlogy:
J. Allen Hynek: 18
Stanton Friedman: 2
Donald Keyhoe: 1
Bill Cooper: 8 (single entry)
John Lear: 2
Bob Lazar: 7
It seems the real stars of this document are the ones we might expect.
Jaques Vallee: 129
Hal Puthoff: 93
Kit Green: ~65-70
Eric Davis: 47
Tom DeLong: 30
Lue Elizondo: 24
Ross Coulthart: 22
Christopher Mellon: 20
Robert Bigelow: 16
Vallee is mentioned the most, and it's often from his own book:
And as noted, his book
Forbidden Science accounted for 47 claims.
What we have here is the core of the Skinwalker Ranch crowd appearing in a lot of this "UFO Timeline". And a lot of the SWR guys crossover into the To The Stars Acadimy (TTSA). Puthoff, Davis, Green and Vallee all worked at Biglow's privately funded National Institute for Discovery Science (NIDS) at SWR. All but Vallee came back in one form or another to continue at SWR with government money at Bigelow's BASS, the prime contractor to AWWSAP where Elizondo gets involved.
After AWWSAP/BASS folded in ~2012 Puthoff hooked up with former CIA guy Jim Semivan and minor rock star Tom DeLong to found TTSA. Chris Mellon served on the board of TTSA and IIRC invested in it. Elizondo was also brought into TTSA. TTSA was founded in 2017, right about the time the big NYT Kean and Blumenthal article was published, and the famous Navy videos were released. I'm sure that's just a coincidence.
Coulthart is a bit of an outlier here, but in the last few years he's really replaced people like Linda Multon Howe and Geroge Knapp as the go to guy in the media for UFO stories. All 3 of these people started out as actual award-winning journalist at least at small time TV stations for Knapp and Howe, while Coulthart was a regular on the Australian version of 60 Minutes, which I guess is a bit higher up the food chain than a local TV station in 1980s Las Vegas. They've all experienced significant increases in their notoriety once they went full UFO.
As for the rest of them and this document, it's like Kirkpatrick of ARRO claimed. It's the same small group of people having an outsized influence by repeating and rehashing multiple stories repeatedly.
Consider, that in this document Puthoff is repeatedly found telling stories about UFO crash retrieval programs and as far back as 1974 was playing his usual cloak and dagger game while supposedly telling Vallee about secret UFO programs:
Fast forward to this year and we have Chris Mellon bragging that he sent Puthoff, Elizondo and Puthoff's sidekick Eric Davis to testify at ARRO about secret UAP/UFO programs. Same stories, new agency.
Shellenberger claims a "former or current intelligence person" compiled this poorly sourced "UFO Timeline". Elizondo would fit that bill, and in his book, he seems to be very impressed with Puthoff, so maybe. Elizondo though, has also giving credence to the Italian UFO story from 1939 on his TTSA TV show, but maybe he left it out and concentrated on US UFO stories for the US congress.
Puthoff himself could fit the bill, as he often has himself presented as "Former CIA". The reality is that the Army and CIA contracted with the Stanford Research Institute back in the '70s and Puthoff did Psy experiments there FOR the Army/CIA while at SRI. I don't think he was exactly in the CIA.
It could just as likely be that Shellenberger's staffers put this thing together with just enough guidance from someone like Elizondo or someone we've never heard of to qualify it as compiled by an intelligence operative.